Some will argue that it's the very first year of life. It's hazing that brings new parents to their knees: shock therapy for the 18 years ahead.

That's when parenting is most demanding, some say -- in those around-the-clock blurry days and nights.

But there's a reason the next year is called the "Terrible Twos" -- a time of meltdowns, the oft-repeated "No!" and high-speed chases, always potentially damaging to body and property.

If you escape the horribleness of the Twos, the Threes will get you, someone always chimes in.

So, when does it get easier? And which is the most difficult age to raise a child, truly?

As the mother of a newly minted 12-year-old girl, I keep hearing the words of an older colleague haunting my difficult days: Little people, little problems. Big people, big problems, he liked to say.

Curses.

He may have been right.

The longest year may vary by gender and temperament. But a fair number of parents of daughters have warned me that there's a special kind of torment that happens around the ages of 12 to 14.

It was the sage Nora Ephron who advised getting a dog when your children hit their teens.

"When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you," she wrote.

St. Louis-area clinical social worker Debbie Granick has two daughters, ages 12 and 14, and a 16-year-old son. If anyone is walking through the fire, she is.

"The worst year is the one you are least prepared for, when their behavior is most not what you had in mind," Granick said. "It's when you are put in the position of having to be (the) person you least like."

That person might be when you are sleep-deprived and angry at a colicky infant. Or it might be when you resist the impulse to slap a 12-year-old talking back to you, she said.

"It's when they hit on your vulnerabilities," Granick said. "Those years are difficult for everybody." It's typically when parents most often turn into a version of themselves they'd like to keep hidden from the world.

If you look at it through the lens of child development, however, there are biological and social reasons why certain years have a reputation for trying the patience of parents.

In the early years, when toddlers make the discovery that they are different and distinct people from you, they want to maximize that by testing every limit, Granick said. The period from about age 5 to 10 could be considered the golden age of childhood, she added, with a certain level of smoothness in routines.

But in early adolescence, a combination of hormonal changes, a more intense awareness of peers and less security in oneself throws that period into an abyss of frustration and power struggles.

You can't hold it against a baby when he cries all day. As much as it wears down your psyche and emotional reserves, intellectually you know it's not the child's fault. Even with defiant, crazy toddlers, you realize that they are just learning socially appropriate behavior.

But by those later tween and teen years, you begin to hope the previous decade of parenting has made some sort of impression. This may be why these stormy years can feel like the most dispiriting epoch of parenting: You start to question where you went wrong to end up with a child who barely tolerates your presence.

"You went right!" Granick says. "It is their developmental role to challenge everything you've taught them. You have raised a developmentally appropriate child, and you should look at some of the ways in which they are difficult as signs of success."

Even if it's considered "developmentally appropriate," it hurts when someone you love speaks to you disrespectfully and willfully ignores what you've asked them to do. When a child's behavior takes swings of intolerableness, it affects the parent as well. When a child begins to withdraw or shut you out, you wonder how long it may last.

Most of us can likely remember feeling terribly aggrieved by our parents during some phase of our childhood. And every parent of an adult child I've spoken to says that, eventually, by the grace of that relentless passage of time, even teenagers come back around.

Isn't there a way to bypass the worst of it? What can you do to shorten the later-stage Terribles so they don't last two, three, four or more years?

Granick suggests bearing in mind that when children are least lovable, it's precisely when they need the most love. Don't feel compelled to explain or respond to the content of their arguments, she said. But respond to the feeling they are trying to express.

"You don't have to correct the feeling," she said. You can revisit an episode later, outside the heat of the moment, to try to discuss a problem from another perspective. But, "you don't have to correct everything," she said.

It was the same approach we used when they hit the twos and threes: Pick your battles.

Would you swap a defiant, crazy toddler for a defiant, hormonal teenager?

Chances are, the toddler is cuddlier. But then again, the teenager is potty-trained.

The serene and sexy woman sipped a glass of water in a nursing bra, surrounded by glass windows, with bottles of breast milk dangling from her chest, nary a breast pump in sight.

With her toned abs and impossibly tiny bowl of cereal, she's become the poster mom of a popular parlor game: Name everything wrong here.

There are the obvious disconnected bottles, attached hands-free to her anatomy. But there's so much more than the technical failing in this image. There's the even more flawed subtext: Pumping is relaxing! Pumping is fun! Pumping is glamorous!

No, no, and not in the least.

There's a backlash brewing to this contrived and oppressive parenting culture. The myth of glamorous parenting is pushed in our faces by a myriad of powerful forces -- commercial ones trying to sell us things that will solve our problems, as well as social ones, which glorify the Pinterest-enabled anomalies among us.

Sara Given, 31, of Columbus, Ohio, is an unlikely crusader in this rebellion. She is an orchestra teacher for middle and high schoolers and mother of a 1-year-old daughter.

"I feel like some of the parenting culture is very high-pressure," she said.

Her release valve is humor. It often shows up in unexpected places.

What she started as a sardonic microblog has touched a nerve with parents across the world. Last month she started a Tumblr, "It's Like They Know Us," with a simple concept: Whenever Given comes across a ridiculous image marketed toward parents, she adds a caption and posts it online. The "magical pumping mother" was one of her firsts.

In her own parenting experience, Given has experienced puzzling moments when the cheerfully delusional marketing of a product bore no resemblence to her own life.

She was dumbfounded by the instructions that came with the infant carrier she bought for her baby. In the pictures, a woman operates the contraption with one hand while the baby snuggles, all smiles.

"My child acts like I'm trying to set her on fire when I'm trying to put her into it," Given said. The baby carrier never really worked out for her. "We'd make big scenes in public," she said.

Commercial images that seem so divorced from the reality of parenting make her wonder: What is going on?

She's not the only one. In a matter of weeks, she gained nearly 20,000 followers, and has done half a dozen interviews with other websites and media outlets internationally.

"I understand that (advertisers) can't show miserable people when they are trying to sell a product," she said. But some of the images are so over-the-top they drift toward absurdity.

All the furniture is white and spotless. The children are wearing clean, white clothing while being spoon-fed brightly colored baby food. On that white furniture. Older kids are happily chowing down on salads.

"It's like they picked the exact opposite of what a real family would look like," she said.

Marketers have been peddling fantasies with out-of-touch depictions of women and family life since the advent of commercials. But the ability to take down the most ridiculous among them, on a powerful platform, is relatively new.

The '50s saw the glorification of the homemaker, delighted with the appliances and tools that enhanced her domestic prowess. Through the decades, the images of mothers in media have reflected the changing societal expectations of them. So it's interesting that most of the images on Given's Tumblr depict a slim, stylish, sexy working mother in elegant surroundings with perfect children.

In a time-pressured era, when a majority of mothers work outside the home and are inundated with countless parenting blogs, gadgets and advice, it's no surprise that these pictures make us laugh.

When Given sees a picture of a fashionable woman typing on a laptop with one hand, holding a cellphone in the other hand and balancing a baby on her lap -- a baby who is also typing on the computer -- her instinct is to write what all of us are thinking while our eyes roll: "I'm getting so much work done. Toddlers are easy."

Obviously, it's not a picture. It's a parody.

A young teenager from a Michigan high school had pictures of her sexual acts, her drug habit and personal information publicly floating around the Internet a few weeks ago.

Her number of followers on social media jumped from a few thousand to more than 20,000 in a matter of days. She defended herself on Twitter after pictures of her performing a sexual act were posted on Instagram. She briefly became a viral Internet meme.

A reader alerted me to her account. When I saw the pictures of her and her friends in their bathing suits, her school easily identifiable with a quick Google search, I wondered what kind of responsibility an adult bears to a stranger's child in a situation like that.

Where were this girl's parents? Where were her friends' parents?

I was reminded of her when I watched a screening of the movie "Men, Women & Children," opening in theaters Oct. 17, a dark portrayal of how technology is affecting families and intimacy in all of our relationships. It's a movie about the ways in which we seek human connection and how our tech complicates this already rocky terrain.

I asked Jason Reitman, who directed the film and who has an 8-year-old daughter, what he thought about the scenario I confronted earlier.

"My problem isn't with the Internet," he said. "But why is this girl so in search of love that she is throwing all of this online so complete strangers will find her appealing?"

Was she in search of love, or did she think a certain type of fame would make her feel good about herself? In Reitman's movie, the characters experience just about every demon further enabled by technology: porn addiction, eating disorders, affairs, isolation, humiliation.

There are parents in the movie on each far end of the spectrum -- from a hyperviligant mom who tracks her daughter's every move online to one who exploits her daughter's sexuality to put her on a fast-track to fame.

Neither of those approaches works out well for the children involved.

"How do you teach your kids to not be broken by all these things that can shatter your confidence on the Internet?" Reitman said to me. "I just don't know what the rules are."

Generations will look back at us fumbling and trying to find our way with this pervasive digital connectivity. It's as if we are driving without air bags and seat belts right now, Reitman said. It's not as if a car, or technology, is inherently bad, he added. We just haven't worked out the safest operation of it.

Reitman raises questions that go the heart of the modern human condition: Why do we need love and attention from people we don't know? And why do we ignore it from the people who are close to us?

If that young girl on Twitter had been the daughter of someone I know, I would have approached her parents and suggested that they check out her social media accounts because I was worried about her. She may be experimenting with some of the same risky behavior that many other adolescents experience, but she is leaving a permanent trail behind.

Her brain in its mid-teenage years has not yet developed to process actions and consequences the way it will at 25. And while she appears to be reveling in the attention and seeking more of it, I still worry about her emotional and physical safety.

If I had seen her lost on a street corner, would I have stopped to ask if she was OK? I probably would have. Wouldn't we want someone to let us know if one of our kids was in trouble?

I thought about this and picked up the phone to call the principal at her school. I left a message identifying who I was, said I was worried about the social media account of one of his students, and left her name. I suggested he might want to contact her parents.

Did I overstep?

I don't know.

Later that afternoon, there was a local news report in that town that the police were investigating sexual pictures that had been posted of a student at the school.

I checked in on her account a few days later. She had not posted anything for six days, but she was back.

She describes herself online with a Britney Spears lyric: "I'm Mrs. Most Likely To Get On TV For Strippin' On The Streets."